“I just went through a whole week of peo­ple telling me what to do and where to be. It was like being at a fuck­ing Sci­en­tol­ogy sum­mer camp. It was horrible,” he told Rogan. “I gave them four or five days of my time. Thir­teen hours. Every day they have thir­teen hours of fuck­ing activ­i­ties they have mapped out for you. Some days like four­teen or fif­teen hours if you go to their after-hours events.”

TED is absolute­ly cultish. But it’s a cult for the sus­te­nance of ben­e­fi­cial ideas. Elit­ist, moral­ly unsound, iso­lat­ed, self-congratulatory, and tone deaf? Yes. All of those. But use­ful and, in some respects, dar­ing?

Every good movie ends at the right time, while bad series would drag its ending long enough until there’s no juice left to milk.

Stages like TED are necessary platforms to share knowledge, but TED needs to stay back, invisible, neutral and politic-free in order to keep the number one destructor of ideas, of technology, of entertainment, of design, …, of mankind, at bay: ego.

One key element that is missing from TED is an “off” button, and someone who has enough guts to push it before it turns into cancer to the bodies of great ideas and self-sustaining construct that it has helped spread throughout the years.

Constraints become a necessity because our brains seek the path of least resistance. Our brains crave the automation. It’s less painful. The brain would love to produce safe, bland fluff. When we enforce a constraint, we throw a boulder into the path of least resistance and force the brain to create to a path less traveled.

It might sound silly and maybe I’m just a little naive to think this way, but I believe that we (the smart ones) could stand to learn something from our dumb dogs.

“The combination of turn-of-the-century equipment and processes in my studio creates amazing results in this project which blends technology and tradition together” says Smith, the traditional ornamental glass artist from UK, who created the artwork for Mayer’s latest album.

And as Mayer describes, “The album cover is the last expression of what anything else looks like other than the way your music sounds. You can own a person’s album on iTunes, be a huge fan, listen to their record all day but never see their video, never see the live show and also never see any of their liner notes, just the cover as it comes up on your iPhone, or iPod. So then I realized, the most important thing is just that cover. Everyone who listen to the record will see that cover.”

There are a couple of different renditions of the artwork, along with a bunch of memorabilias, on David’s page. In particular, the short movie by Danny Cooke is equally great of a craft.